Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor, is an Associate Professor in English and Director of the Program in African & African American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), The Souls of Mixed Folks (Stanford University Press, Fall 2010), and is currently working on a book on post-race and post-apartheid performance in the U.S. and South Africa with her husband, Professor Harry J. Elam, Jr. She has published articles in African American Review, American Literature, Callaloo, Theatre Journal, and Genre, among others. Her work also appears in collections on race and culture such as Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race and Gender from ""Oroonoko"" to Anita Hill (eds. Cathy Davidson and Michael Moon, Duke University Press) and in W.E.B. Du Bois and the Gender of the Color-Line (U of Minnesota P., eds. Susan Gillman and Alys Weinbaum). Chair of the Editorial Board of Stanford University Press and a member of the Executive Committee, Black Literatures & Culture Division of the Modern Language Association, Elam is the recipient of the St Clair Drake Outstanding Teaching Award at Stanford (2004, 2006), and served as Director of Undergraduate Studies 2006-8. Recent undergraduate and graduate seminars include Narratives of Slavery & Theories of Redress, Race Theory in the Post-Race Era, Mixed Race Literature & Theory, Black to the Future: the End(s) of African American Literary History, W.E.B. Du Bois & American Culture, Toni Morrison & the Occasion of Black Feminism. Her courses and research interests span the 18th-21st centuries, from Olaudah Equiano to Aaron McGruder, and from race and narrative to black cultural performance.

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